It's 3:30 AM Eastern Standard Time as I type this sentence. I was awakened at 1:01 Eastern Daylight Time by cat fights outside my bedroom window. I haven't been able to sleep since. I was wide awake for 1:00 - 2:00 Eastern Daylight Time and 1:00 - 2:00 Eastern Standard Time. I heard cat screaming three times, ran to the door each time, saw not one cat. It's 7:27 EST as I type this sentence. A few minutes ago, three minutes before I typed this sentence, I saw MomCat but haven't yet seen Frankie or Napoleon. I'm not overly concerned, he tells himself. I tried reading to fall back asleep, both Coover's Origin of the Brunists which I'm 3/4th through, it's sort of working, it's sort of not, and Lucie Brock-Broido's new collection of poems, it's sort of working, it's sort of not, and neither worked between 2:00 and 7:00 AM Eastern Standard Time, so I went link-farming between failed attempts to get to sleep. Finding this didn't help sleep return. I could wait until tomorrow to post the link-farming as was the plan but fuck it, that would be more artificial than the artificiality of the original plan. America: Razor Sharp Cuts. Includes haunting photos of Baltimore and elsewhere as well as the Red Horse in Frederick the Mocomofos who visit here will recognize. Attention must be paid, or: Loving Petey: Corporate power will make possible journalism that will take an "adversarial position" -- to corporate power. Corporate power will tell us all when and how we can talk back to it. Corporate power will decide just how "aggressive and adversarial" journalism can be. I do try to stop thinking about these things but can't. Charity assets: It is not encouraging to see Omidyar claim he’s going to “support independent journalists,” apparently blind to the dependencies that support is creating. If there is one principle that he’s going to have to stand by it’s to establish a separation between his own goals and the “independent” journalism that he is funding. There is a history of arms-length trusts running newspapers, ironically including the Scott Trust which owns Greenwald’s previous home The Guardian, set up to ensure that proprietors could not mess with editorial independence. Such separation only comes about if you are aware of the dangers. The history of the Omidyar Network suggests that Greenwald, Poitras, and Scahill’s new patron has little such awareness. Since I've played Chris Watson's field-recordings this week and last and said I haven't played enough Caberat Voltaire on this shitty blog....
- Elizabeth Drew's nostalgia for Never-never-land.
- Why Obama doesn't do what progressives want: Like FDL or not, the last serious attempt by left-wingers other than gays to hold Obama accountable was when they refused to go along with the Affordable Care Act if it didn’t include a public option. FDL said “if this bill has no public option, we won’t support it.” When it didn’t, they didn’t. You may think that’s not a good red-line, but they had a red line. Of course FDL, virtually alone, did not have the juice: they could not inflict enough pain or take away enough funding or create enough bad publicity for Obama to care, especially when powerful interests (read: insurance companies), didn’t want a public option. (For doing so, FDL was attacked by all the usual suspects on “left-wing” blogs and labelled firebaggers.)
- NSA, Obama, and digital vandals.
- A hedgehog in a fox's world.
- Decadence and enlightenment.
- Alpha Zulu.
- Maggie's weekly links.
- { feiulleton }'s weekly links.
- Luster.
- Bedruthan Steps.
- Sleeping with the dictionary.
PRAIRIE OCTOPUS, AWAKE
Nicky Beer
The night’s turned everything to junipers
shagged & spooked with cerulean chalk-fruit,
weird berries whiffing of Martians in rut.
I forget this isn’t my universe
sometimes. Sometimes I think I was falling
most of my life to land here, a lone skirl
in the immaculate hush. In my world
I waltzed with my ink-self, my black shantung.
Owls swallow vowels in stilled trees. It’s not
sleeplessness, it’s fear of what the dark will
do if I don’t keep a close eye on it.
Blue minutes leak from the pricked stars’ prisms,
seep into the earth unchecked. Just as well—
I’ve hardly enough arms to gather them.
